Malcolm X's Coming to An Awareness of Language And Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: Aria

Malcolm X's Coming to An Awareness of Language And Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: Aria

Comparison

"Hunger for Memory" is the autobiography of Richard Rodriguez, a well-known Hispanic essayist, through a series of essays, the book deals with many of the hardships of a young boy. Mr. Rodriquez writes about his childhood, when he went to a neighborhood Roman Catholic school. He explains how he referred to English (the los gringo's language/public language) and his family language (Spanish). The "los gringo's language" sounded very harsh, cold and emotionless to him. It hurt his ear when he listened to it going to the store. His "family language" sounded like music to his ears, soft, warm and caressing (Terrill, 2010). Where as in the book "coming to awareness of language", malcolm X told us two important events that were being in prison and being a Muslim which affected him and changed his life permanently. And he also told us how he improved his writing and reading skills.

They both learnt English in different environments. In adulthood, Rodriguez spends a great deal of time, during the composition of his dissertation, scouring books on educational theory, searching for any mention of students having followed similar paths with similar struggles. His search was rather unsuccessful, and the cases he did find were “infrequent and slight”. Finding the mention of this Scholarship Boy was an important and meaningful event in Rodriguez's life; it meant that he had some sort of camaraderie in regards to his early struggles. He describes this to us as an extremely type A personality, a high strung perfectionist. Like himself, the Scholarship boy would initially strive for a balance with his incredibly separated school and home lives. Slowly though, as he showed ...